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Very Bad Behavior/Design with "Created By (Name)" and "Modified By (Name)" Fields

I’m wondering if you could confirm my reading of this behavior of the NetDocs Web product.

This afternoon, I used this search: =1001(123456) =1002(78901 OR 23456) =11(pdf) NOT =6(John Q Public)

In plain language, on our install, this would read: “Anything with client number 123456, with matter numbers 78901 or 23456, that is a PDF, that wasn’t uploaded by … “

And here we get to what I’m e-mailing about.

That search didn’t reveal a PDF uploaded by one of my bosses, who shares my first name – which was a file we ended up spending time looking for. When we discovered the existence of the document, I ran a search with =6(“John Q Public”) instead, and saw that it turned up the missing documents.

So am I correct in saying NetDocuments interprets =6(John Q Public) as “Created By (Name) Contains John OR Q OR Public”, whereas =6(“John Q Public”) creates the intended effect?

In other words, the sheer lack of quotes turns a name into an OR statement? If so, I would volunteer that’s highly undesirable, and unexpected, behavior.

My suggestion would be to either change the Created By (Name) or Modified By (Name) requirements to work with authors and not full names (i.e. PUBLICJ instead of John Q Public); or, alternatively, change the way those particular search terms handle a lack of quotation marks, since it’s so likely that those particular search fields will always have spaces within their fields. (Except for Bono or Cher, if they start using NetDocs.) The “OR” behavior, for those particular two fields, will nearly always be undesirable.

I can submit this in the Idea Bank, but to me, this is a urgent design bug needing immediate addressing, and not an idea for how the product can simply be improved.